800 Million People Still Malnourished, U.N. Says

UNITED NATIONS — More than 800 million people worldwide do not get enough to eat, even as the world produces more than twice as much food as it needs, according to new figures released Tuesday by the United Nations.

Hunger has declined slowly over the last decade: 11.3 percent of the world’s population was clinically undernourished in the 2012-14 period, down from 18.7 percent in the 1990-92 period. Hunger keeps its hold on a handful of countries. Chad, Central African Republic and Ethiopia have some of the highest rates of undernourished people. A relatively large percentage of the population remains hungry across South Asia.

And in Iraq, the share of hungry people has soared: Nearly one in four Iraqis are undernourished, according to the report, up from 7.9 percent of the population in the 1990-92 period.

The report defines hunger as having “insufficient food for an active and healthy life.”

Feeding the world is no longer a question of growing more food. The Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the three agencies that produced the report, says the world produces twice the amount of food that the population needs. The problem is poverty.

The report cautions that “increasing productivity may not sufficiently address problems of access for net food buyers and for other vulnerable groups who may require targeted policy interventions such as strengthening safety nets and other social protection.”

One of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of objectives agreed upon by all United Nations members and the world’s leading development institutions, was to reduce by half the proportion of hungry people in developing countries by 2015.

The report said the world was on target to meet that goal, but that natural disasters and conflict had stymied progress in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.